The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging - Supernova: Pliki

CHAPTER 13
Prospects for Intervention
T he retardation or reversal of aging has been a desire of mankind for as long as we can
trace, but biologists have not worked particularly hard to achieve it. One reason for
this—a very poor one, in my view—is that it is clearly a very hard problem, and therefore
one on which progress is likely to be slow and patchy. A big problem with patchy progress,
for the researcher, is that one’s ability to attract funds for subsequent work is always
dependent upon one’s record to date, with the result that both success and failure in science
tend to be self-perpetuating. NB: I call this a poor reason, but of course (a) I speak with the
luxury of a theoretician, whose budget is negligible compared to those of the
experimentalists whose work I study, and (b) it goes without saying that the funding regime
I describe is not the fault of scientists. Therefore I certainly have sympathy with the
widespread disinclination to work on very hard problems. I just don’t like it.
The other main reason why manipulation of the aging process has not been a popular
research field is rather better. It is that the problem is not only very hard, it is also so diffuse
that people have not had much idea where to begin. If a scientist needs one thing more
than any other, it is self-motivation. This is hard to sustain if one has no real confidence
that success in the project immediately underway will constitute real progress towards
one’s ultimate goal. And such, unfortunately, has been the situation in gerontology. We
have mountains of data on what makes for a long, healthy life, but we have lacked sufficient
interpretation of that data to be able to formulate a realistic plan for its exploitation to
engineer an even longer one.
Now, however, that psychological barrier is crumbling. In the foregoing chapters of this
book, I have set out a description of how we age which, though still only hypothetical and in
need of rigorous testing, is a great deal more detailed that any that have preceded it. Detail is
the keystone of scientific confidence: if one describes a process only in broad terms, however
plausible they may sound, others will harbour doubts that some problems have been overlooked,
but if those broad terms can be broken down into lower-level parts, while retaining
overall plausibility, those doubts are correspondingly assuaged. This is not a peculiarity of
science—it is very much the same as the description of a mathematical proof, or the design
of a large computer program. Detail is explanation, and explanation is reassurance.
Moreover, as noted in the Introduction, it is a matter of opinion just how strongly
confirmed by experiment a hypothesis should be before one invests significant resources in
an enterprise which would be valueless if the hypothesis were wrong. The main criterion
which modulates that cutoff is one’s perception of how valuable the enterprise would be if
the hypothesis were right. In the case of MiFRA, many people—including, without doubt,
people with the necessary skills and resources—consider that the enterprise of retarding
aging is quite valuable enough to motivate investment of those resources on the basis of
MiFRA’s present degree of confirmation, prior even to the undertaking of the tests discussed
in Chapter 12. The only factor that has held back such work hitherto has been the presence
The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, by Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey.
©1999 R.G. Landes Company.